Cleaning Up the Ballot

The 1988 elections made a mockery of the concept of the initiative petition as the people’s election tool in California. The need for reform is more glaring than ever. A record 18 initiative measures were on the June and November ballots. Spending on the fall ballot measures surpassed $130 million, four times the previous high.

Anyone with enough money can get virtually anything onto the ballot with the use of paid petition circulators. Public discontent with the process reached a new level this fall when voters faced 29 state ballot measures, counting those put there by the Legislature. No fewer than five confusing and conflicting measures dealt with the complex issue of insurance alone.

Reform will not be easy, nor should it be. Dating from the Progressive Era, the initiative petition enjoys almost sacred status in California. The process provides a safety valve for public action when the Legislature and/or governor thwart the public will and common sense.

Some of the calls for change are being made for the wrong reasons, however. And some of the resistance to reform also is poorly founded. For instance, the sheer volume of spending is not the only measure of what is wrong with the initiative. The record over the years indicates that big spending has been somewhat successful, but certainly not always. The voters have been relatively perceptive in seeing through deceitful television advertising campaigns. A good example was voter approval in November of a cigarette tax increase in spite of massive opposition spending by the tobacco industry.

Opponents of reform contend that nothing should be done to inhibit the initiative process so long as the Legislature remains insensitive to the public will. What is insensitivity to some, however, is wisdom to others. And the legislative process never will work fast enough for some people. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) has a valid point when he argues that special interests are pursuing initiative measures to prevent the Legislature from passing popular bills that they do not like.

Brown has suggested a ban on paid signature circulators, but this has been tried in other states and rejected by the courts. The Legislature should search, however, for some common-sense restrictions on petitioning-for-hire that do not run the risk of abridging free speech. One possibility is some requirement for collecting signatures from a more representative sampling of the state geographically. At present, all the needed signatures could come from a single county.

The major problem with the initiative process, however, is that it produces bad law. Ten years later, the meaning of Proposition 13 still is being fought out in the courts. The idea was simple--to limit property taxes--but the wordy and ambiguous language of Proposition 13 has spawned almost an endless trail of lawsuits seeking to clarify the meaning.

The language of an initiative is subject to virtually no scrutiny. Whatever a sponsor scribbles down on the back of an envelope or a cocktail napkin can wind up becoming the law of the state. In contrast, bills in Sacramento are drafted by lawyers and subjected at many steps along the way to hearings and testimony from experts, both pro and con, before finally being adopted.

The first best modest step to reform is the proposal by the League of Women Voters for an indirect initiative that would expose the ballot proposals to this rigorous legislative process. If they were adopted with no major change, there would be no need for a statewide vote. If not, the sponsors then could win a spot on the ballot with a reduced number of signatures, thus saving both time and money while gaining the initiative some legal credibility. Those who wanted to avoid this legislative hurdle still could go directly to the ballot, but with a greater number of signatures required.

This is the best opportunity to date for some sensible modernization of the initiative process in California. If the Legislature fails to deal with the issue, Californians can be certain that someone will propose to reform the initiative--by initiative. That could be risky business.